January 30, 2007

Mali relics recovered in FranceFrench
customs officials say they have seized more than 650 ancient artefacts smuggled
from Mali in one of the largest such finds at a Paris airport.

Described as an "archaeological treasure", the objects were thought to be on
their way to private US buyers.

Experts say most of the items are from the Neolithic period, but some may be
up to one million years old.

The artefacts are thought to have been taken from archaeological sites on the
edge of the Sahara desert.

The 669 items - 601 stones and 68 bracelets - were confiscated on 19 January
at Charles de Gaulle airport and included axe heads, flintstones and stone
rings.

Most of the artefacts date from a few thousand years BC. But others are from
the Acheulean period, between one million years and 200,000 years old, and from
the Middle Stone Age (200,000 years BC to 20,000 years BC).

The artefacts were shipped in nine parcels from the Malian capital, Bamako,
which the accompanying paperwork described as handcrafted objects.

Customs officials look out for artefacts being exported from specific
countries such as Mali which may be smuggled, a customs spokeswoman told the BBC
News website.

If they have a doubt, they then seize the objects and have them assessed by
experts to establish their age - in this case an expert from the Department of
Prehistory at the Natural History Museum in Paris, she said.

Growing trafficThis type of traffic was unheard of a few years ago, an airport customs
official told the AFP news agency.

"Since 2004 we have observed regular traffic in this kind of contraband.
There is a big market and we are pretty sure that these items, which had been
neatly sorted and were of very high quality, had been pre-sold," Eric Cailheton
said.

French customs officials made two similarly large finds of archaeological
items from Niger in March 2004 and December 2005.

The 2005 haul included more than 5,000 stone arrowheads and 90 carved stone
artefacts, dating back 5,000 years.

The items were found in the baggage of a passenger who arrived on a flight
from Niger's capital, Niamey.

Venture on a wild ride through the isolated landscape of Monument
Valley in the exhibition “Draw Me a Picture” by Navajo artist Steven
Yazzie, opening January 27, and on view through August 2, 2007.

For decades, Monument Valley was used as a backdrop in Hollywood
Westerns that depicted American Indians in racist terms. These films
fed into a mythology of the American West in which Indians were either
stoic noblemen or fierce savages. In “Draw Me a Picture,” Yazzie
challenges these stereotypes of Indian identity by re-envisioning this
landscape from a fresh, alert vantage point.
From the driver’s seat of a self-styled art car, Yazzie winds along a
red dirt road into Monument Valley while simultaneously creating
drawings-in-motion of the dramatic red rock formations passing by.
Powered only by gravity, the art car is “part sculpture, part rolling
studio” according to curator Joe Baker. “Fitted with an attached easel,
[the car] allows the artist to be in motion while drawing the advancing
landscape.” The entire process is captured on film.
“Draw Me a Picture” shatters outmoded thinking about Indians by
offering a new representation of this well-known American landscape.
According to Baker, “through his actions and urgent drawings of
Monument Valley, [Yazzie] reclaims this picture, making it his own by
creating images that are free of expectations and stereotypical
gestures of ‘Indianess.’ The final result is drawing that is alert to
self, place, and time.”
Filmed on a three-day trip to the Navajo Reservation in northern
Arizona, “Draw Me a Picture” is the latest work in Yazzie’s “Drawing
and Driving” series. This series, which investigates the artist’s
relationship to landscape, evolved during a 2006 summer artist
residency at the renowned Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in
Maine.
The art car, along with original drawings and paintings and a large scale video projection of the 1925 silent film, The Vanishing American, will be included in the exhibition.
For a behind the scenes look at the filming of “Draw Me a Picture,” visit heard.org and click “Upcoming Exhibitions ” for a link to the artist’s Web site.
"Draw Me a Picture" is generously sponsored by the Heard Museum Council.
About the Heard MuseumSince 1929, the Heard has educated visitors from around the world about
the art and cultures of Native people of the Southwest. With almost
40,000 works in its permanent collection, an education center and
award-winning Shop and café, the Heard remains committed to being a
place of learning, discovery and unforgettable experiences.

January 24, 2007

CELEBRATED
Aboriginal artist Nyakul Dawson, a traditional healer who grew up
living nomadically in the desert with his parents, is feared to have
perished on a remote track after an apparent car breakdown 325km east
of Kalgoorlie.

The Pitjantjatjara artist, 69,
and relative Jarman Woods, 45, had not been seen on their sprawling
Pitjantjatjara lands for more than a week when a station hand found
what was believed to be their vehicle and Dawson's body on Dog Fence
Road last Friday.

Searchers later that night found the body of another man, thought to be Mr Woods, about 3.5km south of the vehicle.

The bodies have been flown to Perth for identification and autopsies.

News of the tragic finds spread quickly through the communities of
the Pitjantjatjara lands - covering 12,000sqkm - and was met with
grief, disbelief and confusion by some.

The beige Land Cruiser was found on a dirt road parallel to a newer one, community members told The Australian.

Air searches began when community members told police that the pair
had failed to arrive at the Tjuntjuntjarra community 650km north of
Kalgoorlie as expected.

Hetty Perkins, curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art
at the Art Gallery of NSW, said that Dawson's work bought people from
his Ngaanyatjarra area to national attention. She described him as a
man of immense wit and wisdom and a master craftsman.

She said Dawson's work, which hangs in the National Gallery of
Victoria, helped make him "an incredible ambassador for Australia and
indigenous people, he was really at ease in the international milieu of
dignitaries".

Some of Dawson's work depicts the places he went as a boy with his
mother and father in the western desert region of central Australia.

A traditional healer, Dawson is known among the Irrunytju people as a highly-respected law man and traditional healer.

Dawson's biography on the Agathon Gallery website tells how he lived
in the desert with his extended family where he learnt about the
country, the tjukurpa of cultural law associated with it, and how to
survive in the desert.

"Working beside his grandfather, he began to train as an ngangkari
when he was still a boy. He learnt to use traditional tools and
techniques, combined with spiritual knowledge and tjukurpa. He used
mapanpa (sharp stone blades) to find splinters in the flesh and removed
sickness by sucking out bad blood, touching, kneading and massaging the
body," the biography states.

He worked with prospectors and his memories of this time include the
"terrible smell of the fallout from the nuclear testing at Maralinga"
and being removed from his country to the mission at Warburton by
Native Patrol Officers in the 1950s.

HIV/AIDS
has had a greater impact on the continent of Africa than anywhere else
on earth. African posters concerned with HIV/AIDS education,
prevention, and treatment provide a unique opportunity to examine how
the disease is presented to the African public and to understand the
attitudes and issues that shape strategies for dealing with it. This
exhibition will explore the active role of African visual culture in
confronting the AIDS crisis.

Pandemic in Print
is presented in conjunction with Critical Encounters, an ongoing series
of year-long college-wide examinations of important social issues that
challenge and complicate the thinking of all members of the Columbia
College Chicago community. The focus of Critical Encounters for
2006-2007 is HIV/AIDS.

Mardge
Cohen is a senior physician at John H. Stroger Hospital in Chicago and
founder of WE-ACTx, an organization that provides treatment and
advocacy for HIV infected women and children in Rwanda. Sponsored by
A+D Gallery, Department of Art and Design, in conjunction with the
Department of Liberal Education, Columbia College Chicago.

Chaz
Maviyane-Davies is a graphic designer from Zimbabwe who focuses
primarily on issues of human rights, social justice, health, and the
environment. He is currently a professor at the Massachusetts College
of Art in Boston. Sponsored by A+D Gallery in conjunction with the
Art Talks Lecture Series, Department of Art + Design, Columbia College
Chicago.

This exhibition is sponsored in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

January 19, 2007

In September 2006, I worked closely with the Tonga Traditions
Committee, whose employees were recording the best they could all the
events pertaining to the funeral of King Tupou IV. King Taufa'ahau
Tupou IV of Tonga, the fourth king in the modern dynasty of Tongan
rulers died after forty-one years of reign on 10 September in a New
Zealand hospital. Through genealogy, Tupou IV embodied the three royal
lines of Tuâi Tonga, Tuâi Kanokupolo and Tuâi Takalaua.

Monday 18 September 2006. People from Niuatoputapu prepare
to enter the palace grounds with barkcloth, fine mats, and a basket. Everyone is wearing the appropriate attire for funerals which consists of black clothing,
a ragged mat with a pandanus strip belt.

From the day the kingâs body arrived on Tongan soil (13 September
2006) different funeral rites were performed. The activities included
ceremonial presentations; lotu, prayer vigils; takip?, all-night wakes
when palm sheath torches are lit around the palace grounds; haâamo,
presentations of kava, pigs, and cooked foods in palm leaf basket which
are carried on sticks over the shoulder; feiâumu, cooking of food in an
underground oven; taumafa kava, royal kava drinking ceremony; and of
course the different aspects of the interment ceremony itself that took
place on 19th September.

Tongan funerals, named putu or meâa fakaâeiki â the honorific term
used for chiefly funerals - have been discussed in literature from
different perspectives. Instead of looking at how funerals reinforce
kinship ties (Kaeppler 1978) or what the effective cost is of the
objects exchanged (James 2002), I will concentrate on materiality of
the ceremonial presentation made before and on the first few days after
the funeral.

Most of the presentations took place on the palace grounds under the
marquis set up to the left of the palace. Members of the royal family
would sit cross-legged with their backs to the sea and facing the group
of people performing the presentations. The members of the presenting
group (a church group, a village, an island, nation or a government
department) positioned themselves in a semi-circle facing the sea and
the members of the royal family. These presentations followed a set
scheme. First the chiefâs attendant or mat?pule would briefly present
the objects. These included kava, root crops, live pigs and half-cooked
pigs, mats, yams, taro, tapioca, barkcloth, mats, baskets, flower
garlands and flower baskets, coconut oil, cakes, bead spreads, crisps,
fruit, sweets and large screens named tapu, made out of mats, barkcloth
or flowers which will ultimately serve as grave decoration. Then all
the products of agriculture and animal husbandry are enumerated by a
mat?pule and counted one by one, by touching every pig, kava plant, and
palm leaf food basket. After this, a woman enumerates the list of all
the other objects that are being presented. The quantity, length and
name of the mats and barkcloths is stated. The goods the woman
enumerated, are spread out in the circle formed by the giving party and
receiving party. No one physically counted these goods. The mat?pule of
the presenting group, finally gives a speech and a dried piece of kava
root is presented. The mat?pule of the receiving party reciprocates
with a closing speech after which people pay their respects to the
members of the royal family presiding the presentation.

This descriptive piece of writing is preliminary to a more
analytical article focusing on the materiality of the 2006 funeral, and
linking it with past funerary practices.

Wednesday 20 September 2006. Presentation on the first day after the funeral. There are kava plants in the foreground, and half-cooked pigs in the background. Women are carrying flower baskets on the right.

Friday 21 September 2006. Presentation of a large tapu
(grave decoration) made of fine mats (kie) and barkcloth (ngatu).

Thursday 21 September 2006. A p'kakala, or âflower fenceâ,
made of freshly cut flowers and leaves, mounted on a background of barkcloth, is presented by the Catholic schoolchildren.

Monday 18 September 2006. Delegation from Niuatoputapu
with mats and barkcloth.

Thursday 21 September 2006. Presentation of baskets filled with sweets, fruits, crisps, and coconut oil. A tapu lole (grave decoration)
made with sweets such as Cadbury chocolate, crisps and other sweets. Cakes, fine mats and bedspreads were also presented on this occasion.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
has provided information on its current exhibition of art from the
Papuan Gulf area of New Guinea, running through September 2, 2007. A
release excerpt, modified for tense, offers the following:

An
exhibition of some 60 powerful and graphically elaborate sculptures and
30 rare historical photographs from the Papuan Gulf area of the island
of New Guinea went on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, beginning
October 24. Featuring sacred objects as well as photographs, Coaxing the Spirits to Dance: Art of the Papuan Gulf
demonstrates how deeply embedded art was in the region's social life in
the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The exhibition is the first
in-depth investigation of these art traditions in 45 years. Drawn from
public and private collections, as well as the Museum's own holdings,
many of the works will be exhibited for the first time.

The
exhibition was organized by the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College,
in collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. “This
is the first comprehensive study of the material since the
groundbreaking 1961 exhibition Art Styles of the Papuan Gulf
at the Museum of Primitive Art,” said Virginia-Lee Webb, Research
Curator in the Metropolitan Museum's Department of the Arts of Africa,
Oceania, and the Americas. “That exhibition was organized by the late
Douglas Newton, who later became a curator at the Metropolitan Museum,
when the Museum of Primitive Art's collection transferred here. The
current exhibition, Coaxing the Spirits to Dance,
and its catalogue make important contributions to our knowledge of one
of the major art traditions of the island of New Guinea, the world's
second largest island.”

Representing spirits in
the form of masks, figures, and ancestor or spirit boards, the
sculptures were used to cajole and coax supernatural beings to attend
to human needs. The juxtaposition of rare photographic images with the
objects – objects often specifically identifiable in the photographs –
allows for a ready presentation of culturally specific ideas. The
selection of historical photographs, taken by 19th- and 20th-century
travelers to the Papuan Gulf, is primarily drawn from the Museum's
Photograph Study Collection in the Department of the Arts of Africa,
Oceania, and the Americas.

Among the
objects on view, highlights include: a mask called hokore with a bold
design depicting a gecko, a clan totem; a carved and painted spirit
board called titi ebiha, with an image of a spirit in human form with
asymmetrical legs animated in dance; and a masterfully carved wooden
figure called agibe that celebrated Kerewa ancestors and the communal
longhouse identity ensuring success in conflict. Highlights among the
photographs are the Iriwake Figure in Longhouse (daima), recording the
exceedingly rare sculpture called Iriwake – together for the first time
in the exhibition – taken by Paul Baron de Rautenfeld (Swiss,
1865-1957) in Maiaki village on May 19, 1925; Young Men with Maiva
Shields, 1881-1889, one of the earliest photographs documenting art
from the Papuan Gulf, made by William Lawes (English, 1839-1907)
between 1881 and 1889; and Masks, hevehe Dancing on Beach with Girls,
February 1932, by Francis Edgar Williams (Australian, 1893-1943),
capturing women dancing “with their arms held high like a flock of
mountain birds” alongside towering hevehe masks, which represent sea
spirits that have been placated and coaxed to dance.

The
exhibition in New York is organized by Virginia-Lee Webb. It will be
accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Robert L. Welsch, Visiting
Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College, Sebastian Haraha,
Senior Technical Officer, Department of Anthropology, National Museum
and Art Gallery, Papua New Guinea, and Virginia-Lee Webb.

A
related Sunday at the Met Conference, with participation by
international scholars, is planned for spring 2007, and a variety of
educational programs will be offered concurrent with the exhibition,
including gallery talks, family programs, and a screening of the
documentary film The Mythic Camera of Frank Hurley.

Podcasts and other resources related to the exhibition are available online.

In 1984 “'Primitivism' in 20th-Century Art” at the Museum of Modern
Art caused a hullabaloo, not because the show was good, but because it
was perceived to be so wrong. In tracing the relationships between
Western Modernism and the arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, the
curators took a universalist approach. They gave short shrift to
context and cultural meaning and assigned non-Western art a supporting
role in the story of Western Modernism.

By the early 1980s
this perspective was badly out of date. Multiculturalist thinking was
redefining the most basic terms: “art,” “African, “Modernism,”
“universal.” Today these terms and ideas continue to be tested, revised
and expanded. “Primitivism Revisited” gives some sense of those
developments.

Organized by 18 graduate students from a class taught by Susan Vogel, professor of African art and architecture at Columbia University,
and coordinated by Olivia Powell and Dan Leers, the show breaks down
into several thematic sections, with two students in charge of each.
Mixing contemporary art by Western and African-born artists with
examples of — these labels are up for grabs — traditional and tourist
art, the show asks telling questions about authenticity, spiritual
utility and cross-cultural perception.

If the themes aren’t
new, a certain 21st-century way of approaching them, in a balanced
back-and-forth between Western and non-Western cultures, feels fresh.
Not coincidentally, all the art looks invigorated and somehow added-to.

A vampy Elizabeth Peyton male beauty matched with a carved Baule
spirit spouse suggest different, but not necessarily polar, embodiments
of desire. Seeing a documentary video of a traditional masquerade in
Burkina Faso next to a film of a masked performance organized by the
artist Pedro Lasch in Jackson Heights, Queens, is a reminder that
Africa had performance art, conceptual art, installation art, body art
and sound art long before the modern West cooked up such labels.

January 17, 2007

Environmental
concerns in the museum world often have to do with the temperature,
relative humidity and vibration abatement in galleries where precious
works of art are stored or shown; little, until recently, has been said
of the environmental sustainability of such buildings. In the spate of
museum expansions over the past few years, only a handful have sought Leadership in Energy Environmental Design
[LEED] certification: Los Angeles' Getty Center, Michigan's Grand
Rapids Museum of Art, and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum
in Massachusetts.

Still, one big-name museum leads the pack. Writes The Art Newspaper:

The Art Institute of Chicago is perhaps one of the most ­environmentally sound museums in the country. The institute is seeking a silver certification for its $285m expansion by Renzo Piano,
which is now under construction and integrates a range of green
features including a photocell lighting system that dims as ambient
light gets brighter and a double-window façade that ­provides natural
ventilation and light. Nearly ten years ago, the museum had the
foresight to install solar panels on its roof and it recently hired a
consulting firm to assess if it can save energy by overhauling its
heating, ventilating and air conditioning systems.

Some
architects such as Renzo Piano are known for using natural lighting and
energy-efficient systems having been trained in continental Europe
where fuel costs are significantly higher and where energy-related
building codes are much stricter than in the US. Since museums require
24-hour humidity and temperature controls, an initial investment in
energy-efficient systems could significantly reduce operational costs
in the long-term.

The paper also highlights geo-thermal
heating and cooling systems at the Center for Architecture in New York
and the expanded MoMA, an institution that received a $400,000 state
grant to install a chilled-water cooling plant. But why isn't green
design more prevalent in the presumably progressive art world?

"Because
artworks must now be immortal, we need an ever increasing number of
buildings equipped with every latest technical gizmo to house them,"
writes Jonathan Glancey at the Guardian
blogs. He says that, short of a change in attitude about permanently
pristine art, there needs to be a shift of focus to outdoor sculpture
parks. In a piece in which he coins a term that smacks of politics
rather than stewardship--"ecological correctness"--he concludes:

If
he's right, that begs a future question: how will museums--especially
those that show contemporary art and architecture--reconcile the
forward-thinking and often progressive messages of the art they show
with construction that mires them in an unsustainable past?

Image:
Installation of part of the 216-foot sunshade that "floats like an
umbrella" over second-story galleries in the Renzo Piano-designed Art
Institute of Chicago expansion, set to open in 2009.

January 16, 2007

When approaching an image of Wandjina, the spirits that are believed to have created the Aboriginal tribes of the Kimberley
on Australia's northwest coast, certain protocols should be followed:
typically, a shout out to warn the Wandjina of your approach is
appropriate.

Mike
Donaldson, president of the Kimberley society, says, "This person
shouldn't be doing graffiti, that's the bottom line... but from my
perspective, it does raise the awareness of Aboriginal culture." [read on...]